LIS 568: Google Certified!

       This week, in honor of my taking and passing the L1 Google Certification Exam (Woo-hoo!) I wanted to concentrate on one of the Apps. But which one, which one?? I just set up a Google Form as a worksheet for my 7th grade class, who are currently evaluating board games as a pre-activity for building their own; I have some love and some hate/non-love for the Form that I would like to share.

I never even knew all that I could do with Google Apps for Education before I began this school year. I had played around just a bit on docs, and I had set up Classroom a couple of times but rarely used it to its potential. It wasn’t until I gained a Google Innovator as a mentor that I began to realize the power of the Apps-- and how easy they are to learn!

Back to the Form at hand. First off, I set up a Form, not a worksheet. I SHOULD have set it up as a worksheet, but I really didn’t see the difference. I assumed that my students would come in, I would explain the activity, model how one worked, set them free, and receive my data-- their responses-- by the end of the period. Not so. Instead, an impending fourth nor’easter and a 12-year-old mentality (SNOWDAYSNOOOOWDAY!) slowed the work to the point that I wanted to have them finish the following period we would meet.

Well, that, my friends, is problematic. Because I had not initially set it up so that the students could edit and resubmit, and because I did not use the worksheet, none of them could see their work when we reconvened today. I’m not even entirely sure if setting it up beforehand would allow them to see their work, or if it just means that they would be able to overwrite any previous responses by submitting the form again. This is an uncertainty that I will be able to answer, but I first need to see my other class section before I can confirm anything. Stay tuned for the update! ((update: they could not.))

The whole experience, I feel, was a rookie mistake and one that will not be repeated due to my practice with it-- but one that you can totally avoid now that you’ve heard my woe.

However, if you haven’t yet, go use Forms as exit tickets, surveys, or to quiz your students. The data links to a Google Sheet you can set up along with the Form, and it can then be expressed in charts that can show off your students’ knowledge or preferences. In the library, you can use it to clearly illustrate the types of books the users are interested in… in LIS 587 my group chose to use a Form as a needs analysis tool that I think would be successful in a real-world scenario.

If you are so beyond me in your experience with Forms, maybe you can take it all one step further, to Google Data Analytics. I need to play with this a bit more; it wasn't on the L1 exam, HA. Still, check it out for real-time updates to the data submitted through Forms… it is the same program used by Hommocks Middle School (remember that article we read?) to display their student data.